This is the berry patch (and the neighbour’s house) it’s hard to tell but there’s about 50 plants in there, excluding the 100 stems of raspberry.

I bought a cheap ($7) box of kindling from the supermarket. These boxes came with various sizes of wood, but the one I picked had a lot of 300 x 50 x 10 (about 12″ x 2″ x 3/8″) pieces, at least at the top. I probably got at least 20 good pieces out of the box, and the rest was good kindling anyway. I imagine this is all cheap pine (roughsawn).

The result was not bad, certainly good enough for a quick and dirty marker. My first experiment was the one at the the top (Orangeberry). This was RASTER engraved and ended up about etched about 1mm deep. It was clear and readable, apart from the smoke damage at the top. The downside was that it took ages to burn – nearly 20 minutes just for one marker.

Inkscape, once again, came to the rescue. There’s a very handy extension under Extensions – Render – Hershey Text, which takes text and writes it in VECTOR format, using the sort of fonts that were used by pen plotters in days gone by. It’s very readable, and far, far, faster. The slowest label above took under 30 seconds to draw.

Note: Tucked in the documentation was a suggestion to run Path – Simplify on the text produced. This only takes a moment, and it does smooth out the text and make it look nicer.

These were the engraving parameters I used on my 80W CO2 laser. Basically 85%, but reduced slightly on the corners. However, to make the text more readable, I mis-focussed the laser. I set the focus distance with a 12mm thick block sitting above the target. This made the lines quite a bit wider. Interestingly, it also changed the cross section to a much more V shape, rather than the usual |___| shape.